The Privilege of Pain
El Privilegio del Dolor
A student describes how, during meditation, a news story about a stranger's death stirred intense pain, and how, for the first time, that pain was experienced not as something to resist but as a privilege and an expression of love.
The Privilege of Pain
A student describes how, during meditation, a news story about a stranger's death stirred intense pain, and how, for the first time, that pain was experienced not as something to resist but as a privilege and an expression of love.
Something happened toward the end of the meditation, when you were asking, "What do you love?" An image had been appearing since this morning. I had read something in an Argentinian newspaper, and it still brings me pain. It wasn't entirely clear this morning, but it started coming to me during the meditation. A few days ago, a forty-two-year-old engineer was working in Palermo, and someone came up to him and stabbed him to take his phone. He had a four-month-old child. Toward the end of the meditation, that story kept coming, and I was feeling this quite intense pain.
What I think was different this time is strange to say, but I felt I loved the pain. My whole life I've been fighting against what I think is quite a lot of sensitivity in this body and mind of mine, along with all the conditioning that says it's bad to feel pain, bad to suffer, bad to be dysfunctional because you're feeling pain. The difference was feeling, I don't know how to describe it, feeling privileged that I could feel pain for a complete stranger. I don't know if there is any help in it, but the sense was that it was a privilege to feel the pain for a complete stranger, and even compassion for my own fears. It is as if pain is actually good.
Love in the pain, pain in the love
In rejecting pain, we choose a kind of fear that actually prevents this love. You said there was a love of the pain, and I relate to that. There is also a love in the pain, and a pain in the love. If I described my own experience to you, eventually that pain, when freed from fear, was known as love. It no longer was experienced as pain, because the experience of pain had carried an overlay of fear.
What I'm hearing is your heart opening into love, even just for what is right. You are relating to this man and his four-month-old son. I believe the care you are carrying truly reaches that far, even if only through an article. But it also affects something beyond that particular terrible situation, which is the love for what is right and the indignation for what is not. At its essence, that experience of pain and indignation actually is love.
Recognizing your own fears
In recognizing your own fears, which you described, you are allowing what you call compassion and love to come to the foreground, to manifest consciously.
It's good to hear. This is new for me, experiencing it as a privilege that I can feel that pain.
It is a miracle. A privilege. It is grace: the privilege to be someone who cares.
Maybe I didn't even think I could care like that for someone I don't know at all. I could relate to him, someone from roughly the same social class, and I used to live there, but I don't know him at all.
That is really beautiful. I would invite you to stay gentle and slow.